Samsung 840 Evo mSATA 250 Gigabyte Review

Taking a closer look at Samsung's lineup of 840 Evo solid state drives shows, there are not only 2.5 inch models but also mSATA cards with up to 1 Terabyte capacity. Today we're having a closer look at the 250 Gigabyte mSATA model and we're rather curious to find out what this piece of hardware is capable of.

One of the biggest
issues with the Samsung 840 (non Pro) was its sequential write performance of 130 Megabyte per second. Since
at this point Samsung just wasn't competitive at all, they really had to do something about this to boost this value into a region where it can compete with for example Crucials M500 SSD. Apart from that Samsung also boosted IOPS performance, when you compare the 840 Evo with the older 840 drives.

At this point you should really ask yourself what kind of sorcery is going on behind the scenes that Samsung was able to triple sequential write performance from one generation to
another. The key to success actually has a name: TurboWrite. That's what the new proprietary technology has been called and basically it is an algorithm, which has been implemented into the firmware of the 840 Evo's new MEX controller. TurboWrite can use a small portion of the DRAM chip, which sits next to the controller on the SSD's PCB and emulate SLC NAND flash. As soon as there are data transfers this emulated SLC cache acts as a high performance buffer. In other words, Samsung brought the concept of DRAM caching into the SSD controller, which massively boosts sequential write performance,
that used to be the achilles heel of the 840 Evo's predecessor.

Next to an improved controller you also get a reworked software suite from Samsung. The latest version of Magician offers lots of features and it's easy to use even for unexperienced users. It's also exactly this group of users which are being addressed by Samsung with all 840 Evo drives and another point where you can see this is the price. With the 840 Evo Samsung is now attacking everywhere and especially their price level in combination with TLC NAND flash is very aggressively chosen.